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You’ll start the lesson by viewing the animated logo that you’ll create as you learn about shape tweens and masks in Flash, in this chapter from Adobe Flash Professional CC Classroom in a Book (2014 release).

The project is an animation of a flame flickering at the top of a fictional company name. The shape of the flame constantly changes as well as the radial gradient fill inside of the flame. A linear gradient sweeps across the letters of the company name from left to right. In this lesson, you’ll animate both the flame and the colors that move across the letters.

Close your browser. Double-click the 06Start.fla file in the Lesson06/06Start folder to open the initial project file in Flash.

Choose File > Save As. Name the file 06_workingcopy.fla, and save it in the 06Start folder. Saving a working copy ensures that the original start file will be available if you want to start over.

Animating Shapes

In the previous two lessons, you learned to create animations with symbol instances. You could animate the motion, scale, rotation, color effect, or the filters applied to symbol instances. However, you couldn’t animate the actual contours of a graphic. For example, creating an animation of the undulating surface of the ocean, or the slithering motion of a snake’s body is difficult—if not impossible—with motion tweens. To do something more organic, you have to use shape tweening.

Shape tweening is a technique for interpolating the stroke and fill changes between different keyframes. Shape tweens make it possible to smoothly morph one shape into another. Any kind of animation that requires that the stroke or the fill of a shape to change—for example, animation of clouds, water, or fire—is a perfect candidate for shape tweening.

Because shape tweening applies only to shapes, you can’t use groups, symbol instances, or bitmap images.